Spring Piano Recital...This Time, With TWO Barrett Girls

Spring has come...and with it, another piano recital for my students. Generally, I do two recitals a year: one at Christmastime and one in the spring, towards the end of the school year. While I usually hold my Christmas recitals at the home of Dan Bezzant, my LDS bishop, I have started holding my spring recitals in the activity room of the nearby Green Valley library. I love the Bezzants, but it is a lot to ask to flood their house with piano students twice a year!

The library's activity room has plenty of space for everyone, and they even allow food and drink to be brought in from the outside. And the piano there is a beautiful old instrument. The only problem is that it's obviously not kept up all that well; at our spring recital last year, it was obvious the poor thing hadn't been tuned in several years! I mentioned this in passing to a library employee this year as I was scheduling the room. A few weeks later, that same employee called me up to let me know that they'd found a piano tuner to work on their piano for free! Now that's service! It ensured I'd be scheduling recitals with them for a long time to come.

As usual, I was very proud of all my students and their hard work. Sadly, one of my students had to bow out at the last minute (it was Paloma, who is also my longest-tenured student at this point!). So, like the Christmas recital before it, I wasn't able to have all my students perform.But the students who showed up gave it their all; I was very proud of all of them!

This recital featured two students who were "first-timers" (that is, they'd never performed for anyone outside of their families). Ava was the first...and Celeste was the second! That's right, my beautiful middle child, who just started learning piano this winter, participated in her very first recital this spring! And she did pretty well, if I do say so myself:

Celeste claimed to be very nervous, but I wouldn't have guessed it from watching her perform. She kept her focus on her music, played carefully, and made no big mistakes. She also made sure to wear a dress, so she could "curtsey" at the end of her songs.

This was not Lorelai's first recital, and she came ready. She had been practicing both her songs for a long time, and she was happy to finally be performing them.

Even though our girls are not big Star Wars fans, Lorelai insisted on learning the piano version of the Star Wars main theme for the recital. She started a little shaky at first, but recovered nicely! It was a lot of fun for her to learn.

In a neat coincidence, Aidan, one of my older students, also chose a Star Wars song to play. He ended up performing the Imperial March, which was a nice contrast with Lorelai's song. A week later, Aidan performed the March again for his school talent show; on that occasion, he was dressed in full Darth Vader costume! I almost wished he would have done that for our recital, but everyone else might have been a little weirded out.

In the end, I was very proud of everyone, and very thankful for the opportunity to teach them all. A few of the kids are taking the summer off, and it is weird to have so much "free time" upcoming. However, it just means I will have more time to spend with my kids, so that's not entirely a bad thing. This fall, I will be adding a few more kids, all of whom are siblings of current students. It has been interesting teaching both Lorelai and Celeste at the same time, and seeing their different learning and performing styles. I look forward to teaching all these new siblings, and seeing how all of them differ from one another as well.

How Much Mother's Day Celebrating Did We Fit In?

Some of the girls' handmade Mother's Day gifts

Mother's Day is not my favorite holiday of the year, but I have really enjoyed it in recent years, as my daughters have become more aware of the holiday's significance. They have gotten more creative about pampering me (and Nathan has gotten really good at the pampering, too). It is always nice to be pampered! So thanks, family, for making me feel special! It is humbling, sweet, and fun to see what you come up with each year.

The night before the "big day," I got to open Nathan's present to me. It was a hand-cranked stovetop popcorn popper, complete with a bunch of "gourmet" popcorn bags. My man knows what I like; I have already used this popper several times! Was it a practical gift? Nope; but it is totally delicious! As if I didn't crave popcorn enough...now, I am going to crave it constantly!

Mother's Day morning was great. I got to lounge around in bed reading for a while. Then Lorelai brought up an OJ appetizer, which she'd helped make (and when I say "make," I mean, "mix from a frozen can of concentrate").

And then the floor show started! Nathan was hard at work making breakfast for everyone downstairs, so the girls took it upon themselves to provide some entertainment for me (and, I suspect, themselves) while we waited.

Lorelai was first; her first act was the "Dancing Pajama Wizard."

This was soon followed by "Confused Iron Man," in which old Shellhead paraded around in his pajamas, while holding nunchakus (perhaps he forgot he has repulsor beams he can shoot out of his hands?)

Aurora, of course, had to snuggle tightly next to me while all this was going on. She can't help out around the house as much as everyone else yet, but her affections were just as valued that morning.

Each girl (from youngest to oldest) then took a turn putting on a "puppet show" for me. They were all very cute, energetic, and varying levels of coherent.

By the time the puppet shows were ended, Nathan was done cooking; here's the feast he brought up...

Bacon, homemade yogurt with fresh raspberries & granola, and "breakfast babies" (basically an oven pancake). It was all incredibly delicious!

Not long afterwards, I had to haul myself out of bed and get ready for church. I still had to lead the ward choir that morning, after all...duty never sleeps! However, church was nice too, as mothers and women everywhere were showered with gifts and mentioned lovingly in every. Single. Class. It was enough to make a girl feel a bit self-conscious. Don't get me wrong, I think mothers do a wonderful, essential job. I just didn't need to hear it from EVERY SINGLE PERSON all day long to believe it. However, I am still thankful for everyone who put in so much effort to be so thoughtful to everyone.

After church, Nathan got to work making dinner. What a man! It was so nice to have the free time to go on a long walk. The weather this month has been fabulous. Usually, May in Arizona means windows rolled up and air conditioners on all the day long. However, the average temperature has been about ten degrees lower than usual. I even had to wear jeans on a date on May 16th! The windows have stayed open all night! It's a springtime miracle! But anyway, it was lovely weather for a walk.

At first, I was planning on walking by myself, but Lorelai asked to tag along, and I was happy for her company. It is so fun to spend one-on-one time with my girls these days; it's fun to hear their conversations, and learn more about how their minds work. I love seeing my girls turn into "little people," and have deeper conversations with them.

And, of course, it's also fun to take ridiculous selfies at the lake!

Our walk ended up being a little over 4 miles. Lorelai was pretty pooped by the end, but she managed to put one foot in front of the other long enough to get her home. During the walk, I was able to call my own mother and wish her a happy Mother's Day. I am not always the best correspondent, but I am trying really hard to call my parents more often this year. I hope they know how much they mean to me, and how much I still miss them sometimes.

Our special dinner guest was Nathan's mom; it was nice to honor her on Mother's Day as well. She is a wonderful mother and a great example to me. It is so nice to have her close by, and she means a lot to all of us.

I am grateful for all the mothers in my life: my own amazing mother and mother-in-law; and also my many wonderful friends, whose mothering techniques I often learn from and seek to emulate. Most of all, I am grateful for my family, who have given me the privilege of joining the "Mother Club." My husband and my girls are my greatest blessings, and I love them more than I can properly express. I was so flattered to be spoiled by them this Mother's Day; however, I hope they know that my service to them is given gladly and with love every day. I can't imagine my life without them, and I thank God every day for them.

Mother-Daughter Painting Date

In a way, Mother's Day has gotten nicer as my girls have gotten older and become involved in school and extracurricular activities. Why? Because now I get more cute Mother's Day-related crafts, presents, and service, thanks to my daughters' teachers and activity leaders. Thanks, everyone, for hyping up Mother's Day and encouraging my kids to honor it! It is nice to feel needed.

In a future post, I'll show what all my Mother's Day goodies were this year. However, there was one activity a few days before the holiday that I really enjoyed. Celeste's Girl Scout troop held a mommy-daughter painting party, and we were both excited to participate!

This was one of the many Girl Scout activities of the spring, that have been paid for with "cookie money." It's been nice to see her having so much fun with some of these activities, and it was nice to join her for one of them! All the supplies were provided, we just had to show up and be ready to paint.

Neither Celeste nor I had ever participated in a painting party before. And I'll be honest; artistic ability is not something our family is blessed with. However, all we were required to do for this particular project was watch Ms. Carolina (Celeste's troop leader) paint the picture, and then do our best to follow her lead.

Even then, my copy of the painting wasn't too great!! I confess, I spent a lot of time peering at the other mom's pictures, being amazed at how easy they made it look, while I sweated over every brushstroke. The end result looked stunted and un-dramatic to me, but hey...I did the best I could!

One thing I did love about this project, though, was that Celeste was painting the "mirror" of my picture, so our pictures would match together! I was very excited to put them on the wall.

Like me, Celeste often seemed frustrated or ill at ease with her work; more than once, she complained about the picture "not looking good." However, I helped her with some of the more difficult parts, and she did have fun painting little flowers all over her canvas. In the end, she was pleased with her work, especially once she saw how her picture matched up with mine!

This was a really great activity for me and my sweet daughter. I was so happy to get this opportunity to work with Celeste, and I am happy we will always have a visual reminder of our time together. Even if our paintings weren't the prettiest ones to come out of that activity, they mean a great deal to me because they represent me spending some quality time together with my sweet middle child, who sometimes gets a little overlooked in the crazy race that is our lives.

Now, these two pictures are hanging on the wall of Celeste's bedroom, side by side. I love to go in there and look at them hanging together; it reminds me how lucky I am to have such a loving, enthusiastic, creative, sweet daughter.

Our First Triathlon (Technically! We Were Volunteers)

More and more in the last several months, I have felt impressed to find ways to give service in my community. Serving others is not something that comes naturally to me; too often I am content to sit on my bottom, goofing off on the Internet or otherwise wasting time. At other times, I get so wrapped up in my own life that I fail to look around me at the needs of others. But with all my kids soon to be in school all day, I am trying to get myself into a more service-oriented frame of mind. This is also an attitude I want to pass along to my children, so they can find joy in helping others even while they are young.

Luckily, I am surrounded by many inspiring, awesome, service-oriented men and women, and many of them are a great source for service ideas! Cindy, a friend in my LDS ward, introduced me to a great new website, JustServe.org. Though the website is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is not gospel-centered. JustServe.org is a networking tool, created to help people find local community service opportunities. Users need only register with the site (for free), and then they can search the site for information about service needs in their area. The listings include job descriptions and contact information. Although JustServe.org is new in our area of the United States (the Tucson version of the website just went active earlier this year), I am very excited to use it in the future and hope I can make a habit of searching it regularly for opportunities to serve my community.

As luck would have it, we got our first opportunity very soon after registering. Now that I play volleyball in the church every week or so, I have had the chance to meet a lot of new people in our church...including many people of a more "athletic" persuasion than myself. One of these people is Kate Anderson, a sweet, spunky, friendly, enthusiastic, very athletic lady in our LDS stake. She plays volleyball several times a month, and runs triathlons for fun. She's one of those people. Plus, she's expecting her fifth kid, so you could say she's pretty busy. On top of all that, though, she makes her living as a race organizer; she spends a ton of time organizing, coordinating, and supervising races of all types throughout the Tucson area. She is at an event on most Saturdays of the year. I don't know where she finds the energy or time!

Anyway, this spring, Kate managed to organized an Olympic triathlon right here in Sahuarita. And she needed a lot of people to help out. So, due to her prompting (combined with seeing the race listed on JustServe.org), I agreed to be a volunteer at the triathlon! Better yet, I was able to convince my two older daughters to help out as well. I was excited to get more family members involved.

We weren't able to help with the set-up the night before; instead, we were put in charge of a water station in the middle on the day of the triathlon. However, the girls really wanted to see the athletes in action before that, so we woke up extra early and rode our bikes down to Sahuarita Lake, where the first leg of the triathlon had just gotten under way:

Lorelai and Celeste were terribly impressed by (and jealous of) the swimmers in the lake. Most of the time, swimmers aren't allowed in the lake, but an exception was made for the triathlon. Personally, I would never want to swim in the lake...yikes! I'd be too afraid of getting bitten by fish or coated with green muck. But I guess that's why these athletes are better human beings than I'll ever be...they're not afraid of a little lake muck.

After watching the swimmers for a little while, we biked over to the starting line and received our volunteer shirts, as well as our assignments. The girls were very impressed by the bright yellow shirts; they felt very "official." They also snuck an opportunity to watch the beginning of the cycling leg of the triathlon.

Overall, the atmosphere at the starting line was very positive and exciting, and the girls fed off that energy. After receiving a few more instructions, we all rode our bikes a few miles north to the Santa Cruz Park. See? Even though we weren't actually racing in the triathlon, we still got a nice workout from riding our bikes up and down the neighborhood!

We set up our water stand just outside the park, adjacent to the pecan orchards. Another volunteer, Kali, was there with her daughters, so it was quite the family affair.

At our station, we handed out cups with water and Gatorade, as well as some small "energy gel-packs." Most racers didn't take the gel packs because they were drawing near the end of the triathlon and knew the energy boost would come to them too late (our station was located about halfway through the 3.1-mile run). The girls (and later, a few boy volunteers) were very eager to hand everything out, and had a lot of fun doing it, while cheering on all the racers!

After a while, the crowd thinned out. It was obvious most of the racers had already passed by, and it was starting to get hot. Naturally, that meant my girls started to get a little whiny and distracted. Celeste only wanted to sit and pout. Lorelai kept jumping on her bike and racing off to corners of the soccer field without warning, then returning a few minutes later. I was getting a little frustrated at their flightiness, but I had to remind myself that they had already done much to help, and they were hot and tired from all the bike-riding earlier.

After concluding that no more racers were coming, Kali and her children departed. Just a few minutes later, the girls and I followed their lead. We pedaled our bikes home (luckily we only live a few minutes from the park; Celeste was pretty wiped out by this point!), and then drove to the clubhouse for a volunteer pancake breakfast. By the time we got there, almost all the pancakes were gone. I think I may have snagged the very last one (I shared it with my kids).

Celeste was so cranky by this point that she even refused to eat; she sat there and cried loudly while Lorelai and I celebrated our morning of service with a delicious breakfast. Poor Celeste; she usually has a pretty even temper, but when her patience runs out, she really loses control. Right after this, I took both girls home and made them shower and change into comfortable clothes, which cheered them up right away.

Despite tiring out towards the end, we still had a good time and I was grateful for the opportunity to help a friend and serve in the community at the same time. Plus, it was inspiring to watch the triathletes; it almost persuaded me to try out a triathlon in the future (but a sprint-sized triathlon, not an Olympic-sized one. I'm not totally crazy). I admired how fit all the athletes were, and how focused they were on achieving their goal. I hope I can find the same focus for myself in the coming months. I am glad my girls enjoyed the experience as well, and I hope to do something like this with them again soon. Time to bookmark JustServe.org on my web browser and check it frequently!

A Couple Of April Outings

Once Lorelai's play was finished, the rest of our April was...pretty nice, actually, and not too busy! The weather, for one thing, has been absolutely delightful.

Usually April is a "transitional" month, meteorologically speaking. Sure, it has its nice days, but more often than not the temperature hangs around north of 90 degrees for at least a few weeks. Not this year, though! It's the last day of April, and with one or two exceptions, the daily high temperatures have remained firmly in the 80s, or even the 70s! There were even a few rainy days. Highly unusual weather, but I didn't hear anyone complaining. It was so nice to be able to spend a little extra time in the great outdoors, before the annual retreat indoors to the siren song of the air conditioner.

Lots of pretty flowers are around, too! Hooray for spring!

The only downside to such a warm, pleasant April? Even more pollen and dust in the air than usual! My allergies have been pretty strong this year; most mornings I wake up stuffy-nosed and dry-mouthed. However, I will take this temporary (and minor) inconvenience in exchange for some beautiful outdoors time.

We've already had one trip to Madera Canyon this month; we had a picnic up there on Good Friday. This last Saturday, we discovered a heretofore-hidden part of Madera Canyon that we'd never seen before, thanks to some tips from local friends.

Right at the mouth of the canyon, there's a parking lot that leads to Proctor's Trail, a low-key, paved hiking trail with several historical sites and informational signs sprinkled throughout. But a small dirt path that branches off the Proctor's Trail leads hikers down hill, towards the canyon's runoff stream, which has a dramatic flair this far down the mountain...

...namely, a small waterfall! I haven't seen a waterfall in many years, and had no idea I would see one in moisture-deficient Arizona. It's not a large waterfall by any stretch, but it's still pretty. And it's easily approachable; our family was able to wander right up to it.

 

 

Our girls all packed their swimsuits, anticipating a lot of aquatic frolicking. However, most of them were too scared to get all the way underneath the water. Perhaps the mere reality of a nearby waterfall left them shy and overwhelmed?

Adding to that, the water was still pretty cold, and it wasn't a hot day (well, not by our standards...the temperature was in the mid- to high-70s at the time of our hike).

 

Brrr...chilly!

After a while, though, Lorelai and Celeste were each brave enough to get up close and personal with the waterfall, and at least get their heads a little bit wet.

Aurora was content to hang out farther downstream, tossing pebbles in the water and wading around. While Nathan rested creek-side, reading, the rest of us had fun for several minutes getting our feet wet.

We didn't stay too long at the waterfall, but we are definitely planning on a return trip. It was so fun to discover a new spot in a canyon we've visited so many times! Per our friend's request, we have tried to not publicize the waterfall's location too publicly; it's a spot that could easily be over-run by too many people. In fact, another family showed up for a visit just as we were taking our leave! But hopefully people will be polite and careful when visiting, so this spot can be enjoyed by many visitors for a long time to come.

That same week, I had another outing, this time with Celeste and her first-grade class. During mid-April, all the older kids at the charter school were busy with standardized testing, so the younger kids were sent off-campus for several field trips to keep the noise level down. One day, Celeste and her class walked to a nearby park and spent several hours playing outdoor games. The next day, however, the class took the bus up to Tucson (with me along for the ride!). They visited the Mini Time Machine Museum, a fun little museum that features dozen of miniature houses, stores, and other buildings.

We didn't stay too long at the museum but the kids all seemed to enjoy it. We were admitted before the museum's official public opening, so our school had the run of the place. I attempted to keep track of Celeste and a few other kids, with mixed success. There was a lot of running back and forth from one exhibit to the next. I also had fun helping the kids find all the minature "fairy" dolls that were hidden in random places throughout the exhibits. I think the Mini Time Machine Museum is a little over-priced, but still really delightful to visit...I really admire all the craftsmanship on display.

But museums, educational and fascinating they might be, can make rowdy first-graders a little restless. Too much "shushing" and too much quietly lingering in galleries had some kids ready for action. They were lucky, then, when our group stopped for lunch at a city park not far from the museum. There was a large playground there for the kids to play around on, and that playground included this awesome contraption, which is best described as a cross between a merry-go-round and a climbing gym.

As you can see by the above picture, lots of adults were excited by the merry-go-round too. That bearded man is Mark, our school's executive director/jazz band leader/bus driver/all-around kid at heart. Some of the dads who'd chaperoned the field trip also got into the spirit, giving the kids an extra-fast ride.

I'm sure that some of today's helicopter parents would have a fit on this playground, but all of us loved watching the kids delightedly scream and spin. And don't worry...nobody died! Nobody was even hurt! One little girl was hanging halfway out of the merry-go-round by the end of the trip, but she managed to hold on and everything worked out in the end.

After this exciting day, Celeste was pretty pooped. However, she was so happy and grateful that I'd tagged along for the ride. I haven't been a regular presence in her classroom the same way I was last year...I never got a regular volunteer time set up. Hopefully I'll be able to be a little more involved next year, when all the girls are in school (gasp! It is finally starting to feel real for me.). For now, I am glad we were able to share this fun day together, and I hope we will both remember it for a long time.